Profile of Top 10
Artists
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Florentine artist, one of the
great masters of the High Renaissance, celebrated as a painter,
sculptor, architect, engineer and scientist. His profound love
of knowledge and research was the keynote of both his artistic
and scientific endeavors.
His innovations in the field of painting influenced the course
of Italian art for more than a century after his death, and his
scientific studies (particularly in the fields of anatomy,
optics, and hydraulics) anticipated many of the developments of
modern science.
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Ruiz y Picasso showed artistic ability at an early age,
and when he began to study art seriously in Barcelona and
Madrid, he was already a skilled painter. In the early 1900s he
visited and eventually settled in Paris, where he was part of a
vibrant artistic community that included Gertrude Stein.
Although greatly influenced by other artists in Europe and
beyond, Picasso was inventive and prolific, and early in his
career earned a worldwide reputation as an innovator.
Along with Henri Matisse, he is considered one of the greatest
artists of the 20th century. His enormous body of work spans so
many years that art experts generally separate his career into
distinct phases, such as the Blue Period, the Rose Period and
his most famous contribution to modern art, Cubism. Picasso,
unlike so many before him, was an international celebrity as
well as an important contributor to the world of art.
Vincent Van Gogh
A 19th-century painter, Van Gogh is almost as famous for his
mental instability as for his vivid paintings. His career as an
artist lasted only 10 years and coincided with frequent bouts of
depression and anguish; in a famous 1888 incident he slashed off
his left earlobe with a razor. He is closely associated with the
town of Arles in the south of France, where he created many of
his greatest paintings. Among his best-known works are The
Potato Eaters (1885), Starry Night (1889), and Irises (1889). He
died in Auvers, France two days after shooting himself in the
chest with a pistol.
Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali was the 20th century's most famous surrealist
artist, the painter of 1931's The Persistence of Memory (the one
with the droopy clocks). In the 1920s and '30s Dali made his
reputation in Europe and the U.S., influenced by the cubism of
Picasso and the psychological theories of Freud. Breaking with
other surrealist artists in the 1940s, Dali's later paintings
were more realistic and filled with religious and scientific
imagery. Famous for his flamboyant personality as well as his
art, he worked in several media, including film: he collaborated
with filmmaker Luis Buñuel on Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Age
d'Or (1930), and designed the dream sequence for Alfred
Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).
Frida Kahlo
Though her early work showed an appreciation of 14th-century
Italian masters, Kahlo quickly developed her own style. She took
seriously an initiative, popularized by Mexican Muralists, to
paint using indigenous symbols, "rustic" imagery and colors.
Many of her works resembled "retablos" - small paintings of
saints executed on tin, zinc or wood. Kahlo's themes were almost
exclusively about women: women's bodies, birth, death and
survival. In one third of her work, she herself was the subject.
Much has been written of her complicated, disastrous
relationship with Diego Rivera (they were married twice, and
neither was a stranger to extramarital affairs) and Kahlo was
not unhappy that her position as wife took precedence over
renown as a painter. Only artist-friends in the couple's social
circle promoted her work and, at her death, she was still best
known as Diego's wife. This all changed in the 1970s, and Kahlo
now has iconic status in feminist and Hispanic culture.
Michelangelo
Perhaps the greatest influence on western art in the last five
centuries, Michelangelo was an Italian sculptor, architect,
painter and poet in the period known as the High Renaissance.
His great works were almost entirely in the service of the
Catholic Church, and include a huge statue of the Biblical hero
David (over 14 feet tall) in Florence, sculpted between 1501 and
1504, and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome
(commissioned by Pope Julius II), painted between 1508 and 1512.
After 1519 Michelangelo was increasingly active in architecture;
he designed the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, completed after
his death. Along with contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci and
Raphael, he is considered one of the great masters of European
art.
Monet
Claude Monet was a founder and central figure of the 19th
century art movement known as Impressionism. Early in his
career, Monet painted realistic landscapes, but after the 1870s
he focused more on the effect of changing light on everyday
objects. Often he painted multiple studies of the same subjects,
from train stations and haystacks to the London skyline, the
Rouen Cathedral and, most famously, water lilies. During the
Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) Monet fled from Paris to England,
where he formed friendships with Camille Pisarro, Auguste Renoir
and other figures central to Impressionism. He returned to Paris
at the end of the war, but ended up settling in Giverny, where
he began a long series of paintings of haystacks (or grainstacks)
during the 1890s. Monet's Impressionistic paintings sold well
and his financial success allowed him to purchase property in
Giverny, where he built a large garden that became the subject
of his series Water Lilies (1906-26). Monet's scenes have since
become some of the most recognized paintings in the world.
Rembrandt
Born July 15, 1606, Leiden, Netherlands.
Following his burning desire to paint, he left the University of
Leiden, went to Amsterdam and became a pupil of the artist
Pieter Lastman. In due time, he returned to Leiden just long
enough to establish his reputation as a painter. That quickly
accomplished, he made his way back to Amsterdam, became the
leading portrait artist of the day, took on pupils and married a
lovely girl from a wealthy family.
Rembrandt, the master painter, is such a giant figure in the
world of art we almost never use his last name. His works are
notable for their singular brushwork, incomparable use of color
and mastery of light and shadow. Rembrandt also changed the way
people viewed other people, by portraying religious figures as
human, and humans as soulful and poetic. Though his life was
marked time and again by tragedy and trouble, his art grew ever
more light and soaring.
Roy Lichtenstein
Lichtenstein grew up under no specific artistic influence,
neither at home nor at school. But at the age of 14 he attended
a painting class at Parson?s School of Design every Saturday
morning. From 1940 to 1943 he studied in New York at the Art
Students League. Then he was drafted to the US Army and served
in Europe during War II. Back from the army, Lichtenstein
studied at the Ohio State University from 1946 and received his
M.A. in 1949. Like Andy Warhol he worked in the commercial art,
prints and posters business for a while, making designs and
decorating shop windows. From 1957 on, he taught at different
universities.
Lichtenstein worked a lot with stencils, thus producing rows of
oversized dots that should make his art, paintings, prints and
posters look like a huge mass publication product. Although he
prepared and executed his works painstakingly like the old
masters, he wanted his works of art look like machine made. One
of his peculiarities was that he did not want his brush strokes
to be seen. Other than paintings and sculptures, the artist
produced a number of prints for which he used different
techniques: lithographs, screenprints, etchings and woodcuts.
Often he combined these techniques in one print.
Matisse
Henri Matisse is considered the most important French artist of
the 20th century and, along with Pablo Picasso, one of the most
influential modernist painters of the last century. Matisse
began studying drawing and painting in the 1890s. A student of
the masters of Post-Impressionism, Matisse later made a
reputation for himself as the leader of a group of painters
known as Les Fauves. An ironic label given to them by a critic
(it means "wild beasts"), the name reflected Matisse's
aggressive strokes and bold use of primary colors. In 1905
Matisse gained sudden fame with three paintings, including Woman
with the Hat, purchased by the wealthy American ex-patriot
Gertrude Stein. Beyond painting, he worked with lithographs and
sculpture, and during World War II he did a series of book
designs. Later in his career he experimented with paper cutouts
and designed decorations for the Dominican chapel in Vence,
France. Along with Picasso, Matisse was considered one of the
world's greatest living painters throughout his life. His other
works include "The Dance" (1910), "Red Fish" (1911) and "The
Moroccan in Green" (1913). |
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